On today’s episode of Walt Right Perspectives I speak with Peter Banks, a heterodox center-right thinker and writer who serves as president of the The Boyd Institute and also publishes here on Substack at Strong Ideas Held Lightly.
Recently Peter appeared on The Tortuga Society’s biweekly standup call to discuss his work at Boyd on housing policy:
This made for such a provocative and substantive discussion that I wanted to have Peter on my own pod to drill down into some of the thornier aspects of the issue—particularly how housing pertains to race and crime.
Topics Include:
How Peter got big on SS starting with a piece on weirdness in the 2024 polls
The Boyd Institute’s current sprint on how to improve America’s problem solving capacity—be sure to check out their essay contest!
Peter explains his piece America has a ghetto, not a housing problem
Could liberal democracy metabolize a genuinely firm hand response to crime given the even larger racial disparities in incarceration it would produce?
Suburbanization as a quiet accommodation to America’s racial issues
The US racial dialectic is unfair to Hispanics and MENA—across politics / crime / education it’s not white vs. nonwhite so much as black vs. nonblack
Could political devolution that grants black communities more autonomous policing power legitimize harsher carceral policies in inner cities?
Black approval produces a huge dopaminergic return in White Americans due to what amounts to a political religion based around venerating black people
Do WASPs in particular have an inborne sympathy for black people due to both populations sharing a position as America’s founding stock?
The realignment of WASPs and Ellis Islanders in the 2010s
What the hell even is an American? Where does a propositional concept of American citizenhood leave e.g. Louis Farrakhan? Is Americanism defined by perpetual ethnogenesis? Do empires need both chauvinism and pluralism?
Does liberal democracy require mass gaslighting?
Walt’s proposal in 2024 to give blacks reparations in exchange for accepting a much harsher carceral state and end to Affirmative Action
Is the carceral model of NYC scalable to Midwestern and Southern metros?
Are politics too efficient these days to substantively move past gridlock given the need to have 60 senators to effect real structural change?
Is the recent Straussian crime fighting approach of San Francisco portable?
Suburban women as a structural impediment to overt racial conservatism
Intractable asymmetries in the contemporary information environment
How the status valence of ideas artificially represses social conservatism
Sexed epistemic gaps—Peter explains his concept of women as more Bayesian and men as more axiomatic
check out Walter’s General Theory For The Gender Wars
How much should one self-curate in their presentation of secondary issues to maximize persuasive clout in the lanes they care about?
The Zoomer Oral Culture incentivizes people to adopt a floating ephemeral worldview instead of maintaining consistent beliefs over time
Zoomers are far more asymmetric than Millennials and earlier generations, and between assortative mating and the socioeconomic valence of screen time habits future generations are on a trajectory to become even more agentic
Liberalism self-seals against redistributive fury through a collective action problem that moralistically situates low status men as a Girardian scapegoat
How much inequality can society stomach? Can premodern levels of inequality persist alongside enlightenment values? Is liberal democracy doomed?
There’s more dignity in being sorted into a lower caste than having your low status moralized by an obscurantist ostensibly egalitarian order
Discrimination against white men is a self-inflected ladder pulling mechanism
The structural factors that enabled the Boomer Truth Regime
Millennials will propagate an Echo Truth Regime due to having deeply internalized the postwar ideological regime
The dating market is far worse after college, such that people who don’t pair off during undergrad end up a lot more hostile toward the opposite sex
Modern people functionally go through several divorces by the time they’re 30
Loose urban reputation economies and frictionless sexual norms select for performative NPD in men and performative BPD in women
Liberal modernity incentivizes the obfuscation of path dependency
The pros and cons of pursuing alternative paths to success
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